Over the past year, Cisco has continued to deliver on its promise of innovation in our Cisco DNA software subscription suites. As networking demands increase and trends in technology change, Cisco delivers additional innovations via software subscriptions to keep your devices on the cutting-edge of technology. We can deliver the latest features and capabilities to you through our software subscriptions to increase the longevity of your hardware at no additional cost to you. As you continue to renew your Cisco DNA software, we will continue to deliver innovation.
What’s new in Cisco DNA Software for Switching
The first major addition to Cisco DNA Advantage in Switching this year is ThousandEyes. ThousandEyes application observability combined with the Cisco Catalyst® 9300 and 9400 switches provides you with immediate insight into the digital experience of campus users connecting to any application over any network, from laptop to cloud. Cisco DNA Advantage subscribers receive a large suite of ThousandEyes capabilities included with their license. Read more about how this integration solves a critical visibility gap for enterprises.
Another exciting recent innovation is Cisco DNA Spaces for Smart Buildings, now a part of Cisco DNA Advantage. The integration of IoT Gateways on Cisco Catalyst 9000 Switches with Cisco DNA Spaces creates a foundation for managing smart buildings by democratizing the IoT ecosystem. Smart building application providers can now interface with hundreds of different types of device vendors and app partners by using Cisco APIs to extract telemetry from the devices through Cisco DNA Spaces. The IoT Gateways running on the Catalyst 9000 family—the most widely deployed network access in the world—interpret and normalize telemetry from all the various endpoints in a smart building ecosystem, feeding the information to DNA Spaces. This democratized IoT Platform relieves smart building application providers from the responsibility of building integrations to thousands of different devices.
Network Compliance Audit and Network Compliance Remediation are two features that will save your team hours of time each month. Compliance auditing is always a long and tedious process where the IT team verifies the operating version and configuration of each switch for consistency. The new Network Compliance Audit feature allows teams to quickly assess the devices that do not have consistent configuration with the other similar switches. The new Network Compliance Remediation feature allows IT teams to automatically sync running (production) configurations with startup configurations for all the network elements. These two new features together reduce human involvement and error and ensure the network is running the intended configuration standards.
We’ve also improved PoE Analytics. Through Cisco DNA Center Assurance, you can gain visibility into the power over Ethernet usage in all your Catalyst switches, across all your branch offices. View PoE usage and available power per switch and per port. Verify actual power consumption of IoT endpoints, and plan for deployment of new IoT endpoints that require PoE, anywhere in your network.
For a comprehensive list of Switching features, please see the feature matrix.
What’s new in Cisco DNA Software for Wireless
Wireless coverage issues can be challenging to identify and locate. Currently wireless maps do not give a true representation of Wi-Fi signal propagation through actual obstacles, building materials and architectural designs. A new way to visualize your Wi-Fi network is the Wireless 3D analyzer, available in the Cisco DNA Advantage tier. Cisco DNA Center now includes a ground-breaking wireless 3D analyzer which considers granular analysis of millions of spatial RF data points and provides the ability to automatically visualize, identify, locate and alert visualize RF characteristics. Watch a short demo to learn more.
We’ve also improved our Cisco AI Network Analytics offer. New baseline analytics features allows customer to zoom in problematic sites and identify access points that causes Wi-Fi onboarding issues.
Improve your wireless networking by using Ekahau’s wireless planning tools to determine the positioning of your access points to get the best coverage. Using Ekahau tools integration into the Cisco DNA Center make wireless management easier than ever before and streamlining the design process for additional time savings.
For a comprehensive list of Wireless features, please see the feature matrix.
Cisco DNA Expansion Pack replaced Cisco DNA Premier
The Cisco DNA Expansion Pack is a more flexible way to purchase Cisco ISE, Cisco DNA Spaces, Secure Network Analytics (Stealthwatch), ThousandEyes and other licenses, appliances, and services all in one convenient “point and click” ordering menu. Just as you look forward to the latest expansion pack for your favorite video game to help you level up and get the most out of your investment, the Cisco DNA Expansion Pack will enhance your Cisco DNA software experience in areas such as SD-Access, Zero Trust solutions, Encrypted Traffic Analytics (ETA), location analytics, and assurance. Learn more.
What’s next?
We will continue to add more exciting features in 2022 and beyond. We are constantly innovating Cisco DNA software and Cisco DNA Center to keep your network and devices at the forefront of the newest technology.
To unlock that potential and to be a part of that innovation, renew your Cisco DNA software subscription.
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